The House of Mirth
of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had
just placed on a low table near the fire.
The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of
pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped
against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed
luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central
lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck
sparks from their jewels as they moved.
There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they
gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external
finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge
to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the
moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine
spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook
beneath the gallery.
It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired
hold over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him,
but she had neither the skill nor the patience to effect his
capture. She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of
his shyness, and besides, why should she care to give herself the
trouble? At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity
for an evening—after that he would be merely a burden to her, and
knowing this, she was far too experienced to encourage him. But
the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and
toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a
possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had
been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed
to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him
on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more
boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities,
and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do
her the honour of boring her for life.
It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she?
To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with
its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across
the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the
fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and
the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the
reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with
its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not
made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises
of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it
was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe
in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years
ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure
without caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at
the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the
splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even
moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.
For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she could
not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a
taste. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her
associates—in young Ned Silverton, for instance, the charming fair
boy now seated in abject rapture at the elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a
striking divorcee with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-lines
of her “case.” Lily could remember when young Silverton had
stumbled into their circle, with the air of a strayed Arcadian
who has published charming sonnets in his college journal. Since
then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the
latter at least had involved him in expenses from which he had been
more than once rescued by harassed maiden sisters, who treasured
the sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their
darling afloat. Ned’s case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his
charming eyes—which had a good deal more poetry in them than the
sonnets—change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement
to anxiety, as he passed under the spell of the terrible god of
chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her
own case.
For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her
to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she
had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses
and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient
wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown
on her. Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead
of keeping it against future losses, had spent it in dress or
jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined
with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk
higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself
on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must
either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present
surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.
Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold
purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she
returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her
jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which
she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner. Only
twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a
moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took paper
and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to
reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throbbing
with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and again;
but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred
dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her
balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred
in the other direction. Then she returned to her calculations;
but figure as she would, she could not conjure back the vanished
three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set aside to pacify
her dress-maker—unless she should decide to use it as a sop to the
jeweller. At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very
insufficiency had caused her to play high in the hope of doubling
it. But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while
Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have
pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have
afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching
such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with
her guests when they bade her good night.
A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place
to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the
laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its
calculations.
She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had
sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s
pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in
her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were
in the same position, except that the latter received her wages
more regularly.
As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked
hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near
her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.
“Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the
electric light——” she reflected, springing up from her seat and
lighting the candles on the dressing-table.
She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the
candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from
a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a
haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.
Lily rose and undressed in haste.
“It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think
about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that
petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only
defence against them.
But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She
returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks
up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost
sure she had “landed” him: a few days’ work and she would win her
reward. But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she
could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a rest
from worry, no more—and how little that would have seemed to her
a few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the
desiccating air of failure. But why had she failed? Was it her own
fault or that of destiny?
She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used
to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: “But you’ll get
it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.”... The
remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the
darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.
A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was
“company”; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered
with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong
envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a
bronze jar; a series of French and English maids giving warning
amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-closets;
an equally changing dynasty of nurses and footmen; quarrels in the
pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room; precipitate trips to
Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable
unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the summer should
be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of
expense—such was the setting of Lily Bart’s first memories.
Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and
determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her
ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted
father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man
who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs.
Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time
when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with
streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to
her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.
Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was “downtown”;
and in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged
step on the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would
kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or
the governess; then Mrs. Bart’s maid would come to remind him that
he was dining out, and he would hurry away with a nod to Lily. In
summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton,
he was even more effaced and silent than in winter. It seemed
to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the
sea-line from a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of
his wife’s existence went on unheeded a few feet off. Generally,
however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and
before the steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the
horizon. Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having
neglected to forward Mrs. Bart’s remittances; but for the most part
he was never mentioned or thought of till his patient stooping
figure presented itself on the New York dock as a buffer between
the magnitude of his wife’s luggage and the restrictions of the
American custom-house.